$99 Ubuntu computer: Excerpt from mail by Subbiah Arunachalam

This is the kind of computer we need in very large numbers in India! It is below 100 dollars, it is being used and it actually works.

----- Original Message -----
From: Phil Shapiro

yesterday and today i've been trying out the $99 ubuntu linux computer (dell optiplex gx1 -- 600 MHz) being sold for $99 from pcretro.com, a mail-order company in the washington dc area.

this is one very sweet computer. it surfs plenty fast on the web using firefox. i have a slow cable modem connection at my apartment that is equivalent to a 768 kbps dsl connection.

when i go to a web site, there's a pause for 2 or 3 seconds, and then the web page loads quite rapidly. scrolling thru long word processing documents is fast. (i.e. almost no noticeably delay in scrolling thru a 100 page word processing document.)

applications launch relatively quickly. this computer boots faster than my new pentium 4 windows xp system.

for word processing and web surfing, this is a very usable computer. with both firefox and openoffice.org writer programs loaded in memory, i was using 121 megabytes of 251 available megabytes in RAM. that leaves ample free memory for running one or two more applications concurrently.

the 20 gigabyte hard drive on this computer has 15 gigabytes free.

the version of ubuntu on this computer is version 4.10, from late 2004. presumably newer versions of ubuntu would work even better.

i'm really pleased this computer is available to community members at such an affordable price. the small size of this computer is also impressive. it's barely wider than a foot ruler. (it's 12.5 inches wide and 14.9 inches deep.)

this computer has a built-in ethernet port, so it could share a high-speed internet connection using an ethernet hub or switch.